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More "Superstition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... owe you too much already, old man. Besides I had a sort of superstition that this temporary starvation—that's what it was, and it hurt—would bring me luck later. It's over and done with now, and none of the syndicate know how hard up I was. Fire away. What's the exact state ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... member of a cult; a student of mysteries not understood by the many. The others have a superstition about us, that we destroy souls and make others slaves to our will. It is stupid, but it is like all superstitions—hard to disprove because so vague in nature." She flickered impossible eyelashes at me languishingly, in perfect coquetry. ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... the mountaineer is generally coupled suspicion toward strangers, extreme sensitiveness to criticism, superstition, strong religious feeling, and an intense love of home and family. The bitter struggle for existence makes him industrious, frugal, provident; and, when the marauding stage has been outgrown, he is peculiarly honest as a rule. Statistics of crime ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Fear, anger, sympathy, affection, play, imitation, curiosity, acquisitiveness, constructiveness, self-assertion (leadership), self-abasement, rivalry, envy, jealousy, pugnacity, clannishness, the hunting and predatory instincts, the migratory instinct, love of adventure and the unknown, superstition, the sex instincts, which express themselves in sex-love, vanity, coquetry, modesty; and, closely allied with these, the love of nature and of solitude, and the aesthetic, the ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... afterwards, the Licenser regarded it as his chief duty to protect the court against all possibility of attack from the stage. With the morality of plays he did not meddle much; but he still clung to the old superstition that the British drama had only a right to exist as the pastime of royalty; plays and players were still to be subservient to the pleasure of the sovereign. The British public, who, after all, really supported the stage, he declined to consider in the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the angry god bound him upon Mount Caucasus, and decreed that a vulture should prey upon his liver, destroying every day what was renewed in the night. The struggle of man's thought to free itself from the tyranny of fear and superstition and all monsters of the imagination is illustrated in the myth. The myth is one which has been a favorite with modern poets, as witness Goethe, Shelley, Mrs. ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... but he does not yet understand what {92} he is trying to explain, and for that reason the being whom he creates is portentous, but not human. To understand this, you need only compare Richard with Macbeth. In Macbeth we have a host of different forces—ambition, superstition, poetry, remorse, vacillation, affection, despair—all struggling together as they might in you or me; and it is this mingling of feelings with which we all can sympathize that makes him, in spite of all his crimes, a human being like ourselves. But in Richard there is no human complexity. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... much the parent of superstition, that I attribute this saying to the women, who, as mothers, have usually a superstitious dread not only of evil spirits, but also of the evil eye of mortals towards their young ones. When, some twenty years ago, I was told by a Kentish countryman that the church bell was tolled to drive ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... nothing we need fear," I insisted firmly, clasping the upraised hands and meeting her eyes frankly, "and I rely upon you to help me control the men. They are sailors filled with superstition, and will look to us for leadership. Please do not fail me. You have already passed through too much to be frightened at a shadow. This is a staunch vessel, provisioned and fit for any sea. We are far safer here than in the boat; it is as if God had ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... look at your grate, putting the shovel against it to make the fire burn?' JOHNSON. 'They play the trick, but it does not make the fire burn. THERE is a better; (setting the poker perpendicularly up at right angles with the grate.) In days of superstition they thought, as it made a cross with the bars, it ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... fellow-countrymen he became ultimately too Western and too Parisian. His was a delicate, sensitive soul, prone to melancholy and perpetually dreaming. He had a cult of form in which he went so far as to make it a sort of scruple and superstition. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... were impressed, by the royal authority, and the needful stores were taken in the same way. It seems now strange that so much difficulty should have surrounded an expedition in itself so small. But the plan met then all the superstition, terror and other ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... the mysterious warnings and the wild black eyes still thousands of miles away in America? Or was the march of events taking her unexpectedly, too, on the journey to Venice? Agnes started out of her chair, ashamed of even the momentary concession to superstition which was implied by the mere presence of such questions as these in ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... due consideration of this singular superstition, it must be obvious to any person of sense that these pretended ligatures are, in fact, the consequence of an enfeebled constitution, weak intellects, and sometimes of an ardent imagination, an over-excited desire which carries the vitality to the head, and diverts ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... the corners of the fields uncut, and not to pick up the scattered gleanings, which fell from the arms of the harvesters, and to leave on the ground the fruit that fell of itself from the vines and fruit trees. With the Canaanites this was on account of a superstition; the gleanings and the grain in the corners of the fields were for the Baal, or god of the field. If they were taken he would be angry. The Hebrews kept the old custom, but with a different aim—not to keep the Baal in good humor, but to make life a bit easier for the poor ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... important part in the principal transactions, than is always warranted by other authorities. His Chronicle is just such as might have been anticipated from a person of lively imagination, and competent scholarship for the time, deeply dyed with the bigotry and superstition of the Spanish clergy in that century. There is no great discrimination apparent in the work of the worthy curate, who dwells with goggle-eyed credulity on the most absurd marvels, and expends more pages on an empty court ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... shines out in brilliant contrast with the ignorance and superstition of his age. The world was not yet ripe for his advanced ideas, hence when the work lost the support of his strong personality, its effects soon became obliterated, and a retrogression ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... by him in the town. Its tenant was apparently somewhat of a scandal and a stumbling-block to the reforming party. He was a disgrace, they wrote, to the city; he practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy. It was of a piece with the gross corruption and superstition of the Babylonish Church that such a viper and blood-sucking Troldmand should be patronized and harboured by the Bishop. The Bishop met these reproaches boldly; he protested his own abhorrence of all such things as secret arts, and required his ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... was not suspected. Yet the whole train of circumstances had a supernatural air, for the Cure and Jo Portugais had not made public their experience on the eventful night; she had been educated in a land of legend and superstition, and a deep impression had been made upon her mind, giving to her other new emotions a touch of pathos, of imagination, and adding character to her face. The old Seigneur stroked his chin as he looked at her. He realised that a change had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... have never had any other power to give or withhold credit than the credit that was given to them. They exist by sufferance or superstition ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... while they are sugaring off in the spring; and that his own mother had fitted him for college. There was, in fact, something clerical in Northwick's bearing; and it was felt by some that he had studied for the ministry, but had gone into business to help his family. The literary phase of the superstition concerning him was humored by the library which formed such a striking feature of his house in Boston, as well as his house in Hatboro'; at Hatboro' it was really vast, and was so charming and so luxurious that it gave the idea of a cultivated ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... there, Thiers, skill, wrestled with Guizot, strength; there men have mingled, have grappled, have fought, have brandished evidence like a sword. There, for more than a quarter of a century, hatred, rage, superstition, egotism, imposture, shrieking, hissing, barking, writhing, screaming always the same calumnies, shaking always the same clenched fist, spitting, since Christ, the same saliva, have whirled like a cloud-storm about thy serene face, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... whispered to himself, a glow of superstition in his fiery eyes. "We have lived long together, and it is fated that we die together, Oh Upisk. The spring has come for us many times, and soon the black winter will ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Another kind of superstition is as follows. They believe the dead walk by night and feed upon guarina, a fruit resembling the quince, but unknown in Europe. These ghosts love to mix with the living and deceive women. They take on the form of a man, and seem to wish to enjoy a woman's ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... simple man, he will never get through a page of that abstruse work; and my hostess will understand nothing. Is it not strange—these people were peasants a generation ago; they are peasants now by their goodness, hospitality, religion, superstition, and yet they aspire to be eclectic philosophers? Varvara Ilinitchna has life itself to read, and she turns away to look at books. Life does not satisfy her—there are great empty places in it, and she would be bored often but that she has books to open in these places. She was very interesting ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... prevailing characteristic of that personage. One man went as Julius Caesar, for instance, and had a girl typifying ambition as his shadow, another went as Louis the Eleventh, and his companion personified superstition. Your shadow had to be someone of the opposite sex, you see, and every alternate dance throughout the evening you danced with your shadow-partner. Quite a clever idea; young Graf von Schnatelstein is ...
— When William Came • Saki
... hesitate a moment, or feel the least anxiety about its effect upon her future happiness, if the rain were pouring down," said Lucilla; "because she has great confidence in her bridegroom that is to be, and not a particle of superstition in ...
— Elsie at Home • Martha Finley
... has been characterized as a superstition; and superstitious in some respects it unquestionably is. But its superstitious tendency is not exhibited so much in respect to the ordinary process of primary, secondary, and higher education. Not even an American can over-emphasize ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... which either of us had any control, that we fell from our serene estate. On the contrary, it was through a work of pure mercy, intended for the relief of those of our people who were groaning under the pitiless despotism of Russian officialism and superstition, that I fell, as so many thousands of my race have fallen, into that abyss of nameless misery and degradation that Russian hands have dug for the innocent in the ghastly solitudes of Siberia, and, without ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... that she adopted her mistress's superstition; then the queen, incapable of remaining idle in her great preoccupation of mind, collected the few jewels that she had preserved, enclosed them in a casket, got ready for the evening a black dress, in order to be still better hidden in the darkness: and, these preparations made, she sat down ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... two barbed bones and no longer wondered why these fish are so dreaded by those who know them. Joao told me that they attack anyone who ventures into the water, and with their sharp, barbed bones inflict a wound that in most cases proves fatal, for the bones are brittle and break off in the flesh. Superstition and carelessness are the main factors that make the wound dangerous; the people believe too much in an ever-present evil spirit which abides in all the vicious and fiendish animals of the forest and swamp. Once wounded by any of these ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... not greatly inclined to idle superstition as a general thing, but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on purpose that he might hear it, and have it dinned into his mind by force of repetition. There was no reason under heaven ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... prejudices of a classical education taught me to respect those aged trees as the habitation or material frame of an order of sylvan deities, who were now deprived of existence by the sacrilegious hand of a rude, undistinguishing savage. But without having recourse to superstition it is not difficult to account for such feelings on the sight of a venerable wood, old, to appearance, as the soil it stood on, and beautiful beyond what pencil can describe, annihilated for the temporary use of the space it occupied. It seemed a violation of nature ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... absurd; but his sincerity should awaken in us an affectionate interest in his behalf, not engender the bitter hatred which at present forms an adamantine barrier between us. If the Protestant would give up a little of his bigotry, and the Catholic a part of his superstition, and they would consent to meet each other half way, as brothers of one common manhood, inspired by the same Christian hope, and bound to the same heavenly country, we should no longer see the orange banner flaunting our streets on the twelfth of July, and natives of the same island provoking ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... them in science, in literature, in the younger generation.... That is why I have no preference either for gendarmes, or for butchers, or for scientists, or for writers, or for the younger generation. I regard trade marks and labels as a superstition. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom—freedom from violence and lying, whatever forms they make take. This is the programme I would follow if I ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... colossal lotuses of gilded silver, offerings, lamps, lacquer, litany books, gongs, drums, bells, and all the mysterious symbols of a faith which is a system of morals and metaphysics to the educated and initiated, and an idolatrous superstition to the masses. In this interior the light was dim, the lamps burned low, the atmosphere was heavy with incense, and amidst its fumes shaven priests in chasubles and stoles moved noiselessly over the soft matting round the high altar on which Kwan-non is enshrined, lighting candles, ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... 'discovering certain late detestable practices of some domineering Lordly Prelates to undermine the established doctrine and discipline of our Church, extirpate all orthodox sincere preachers and preaching of God's Word, usher in popery, idolatry and superstition.' For this publication Prynne was sentenced to be fined 5,000 pounds to the King, to lose the remainder of his ears, to be branded on both cheeks, and to be perpetually imprisoned in Carnarvon Castle. At that time the Ipswich people were far too Liberal for the powers ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... and inclined to a cheerful and cursory reading of the face of life; and possibly this attitude of mind was the original cause of his misfortunes. Beyond this hint philosophy is silent on his career, and superstition steps in with the more ready explanation that he was detested of ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... incantations of the "abracadabra" kind, says, "A Christian old woman is wiser than these philosophers." In truth, the spirit of Plato lived in, and not outside Christianity, even in the time of Porphyry. And on the cultus of angels and spirits, which was closely connected with theurgic superstition, St. Augustine's judgment is very instructive. "Whom should I find," he asks, "to reconcile me to Thee? Should I approach the angels? With what prayers, with what rites? Many, as I hear, have tried this method, and have come to crave for curious visions, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... suspicious creature, like jealous brides she had read about. She determined to be silent as a self-punishment, and firmly steered the Monarchic into a backwater of her thoughts, while Knight talked of the Valley House party and their credulous superstition. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... upon the young)—"you are too slow. You are asleep, stagnant, dormant, hibernating. The whole world is 'beating you to it.' Get over your baby superstition about love, and ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... England had commenced. The Popish propaganda had determined to make a grand attempt on England; Popish priests were scattered over the land, doing the best they could to make converts to the old superstition. With the plans of Rome, and her hopes, and the reasons on which those hopes are grounded, the hero of the book becomes acquainted, during an expedition which he makes into the country, from certain conversations which he holds with a priest in a dingle, in which ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... expression changed to disappointment. "But that's not reasonable," he cried. "That's not reasonable. That's superstition. Call a thing a drug and condemn it! Everything is a drug. Everything that affects you. Food stimulates or tranquillizes. Drink. Noise is a stimulant and quiet an opiate. What is life but response to stimulants? Or reaction after them? When I'm ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... way of knowing how the gold-bearing area would run. A fortune might come out of one claim of a hundred feet and its next-door neighbour might not yield an atom of gold. Only the genii of the hidden earth held the secret; and modern science derides the invisible pixies of superstition, just as these invisible spirits of the earth seem to laugh at man's best efforts ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... forgery, executed after the return from the Captivity. Debarred, therefore, from one chief security against speculative delusion, the philosophers of France, in their eagerness to escape from what they deemed a superstition of the priests, flung themselves headlong into a superstition ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Maiden, are the pangs that wait the hour Of calmest dissolution! yet weak man Dares, in his timid piety, to live; And veiling Fear in Superstition's garb, He calls her Resignation! Coward wretch! Fond Coward! thus to make his Reason war Against his Reason! Insect as he is, This sport of Chance, this being of a day, Whose whole existence the next cloud may blast, Believes himself the ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... Bob, founded in error or superstition. You have confused the will with the deed. I am indeed willing to try anything, but my capacity for action is limited, like my knowledge. In regard to the higher mathematics, for instance, I know nothing. Copper-mining I do not understand. I may say the same with reference to Tartar ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... the church of Christian men. After the apostles' time, and even during the apostles' time, as we read from the Epistle to the Galatians, they fell away, step by step, from the liberty of the gospel, till they sunk entirely into popish superstition. And yet God brought good out of that evil. He made that very popery a means of bringing them back at the Reformation into clearer light than any of the first Christians ever had had. He is going on step by step still, bringing Christians ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... stood the famous temple of Mount Phaunus, which was flourishing in the beginning of the fourth century, and, according to Rivet, was considered one of the three most celebrated in Gaul. Belenus was the divinity principally worshipped in it; but, according to popular superstition, adoration was also paid to a golden calf, which was buried in the hill, and still remains entombed there. Even within the last fifty years, two laborers have lost their lives in a fruitless attempt to find this hidden treasure. Tombs, and urns, and human bones, are constantly ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... "When they persecute you in this city," he says, "flee into the next." He preaches in the synagogues and in the open air indifferently, just as they come. He repeatedly says, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice," meaning evidently to clear himself of the inveterate superstition that suffering is gratifying to God. "Be not, as the Pharisees, of a sad countenance," he says. He is convivial, feasting with Roman officials and sinners. He is careless of his person, and is remonstrated ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... be troubled by this new Horror. To-day a citizen writes as follows:—"Why are not the National Guards installed in the churches? Not only might they find in these edifices dedicated to an extinct superstition, shelter from the weather, but orators might from time to time in the pulpits deliver speeches. Those churches which are not required by the National Guard might serve as excellent stables for the oxen, the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... among a people devoted to superstition, those terrible passes and sultry hollows should be marked as the haunts of the powers of evil. Adyli, a deep mysterious cavern at the extremity of one of those melancholy plains, is believed to be the especial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of her acquaintances, a thought more good-natured than the rest, arranged that lovely, happy Nancy should be married from a pleasant country house, in a dear little country church. Braving superstition, the wedding took place in the last week of May, and bride and bridegroom had gone to Italy—though, to be sure, it was rather late for Italy—for three ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... steps leading up to the house-terrace without having seen Mary. If he had been willing to harbour superstitious fancies then, he would have believed that Mary had sent her spirit to meet him in this mournfully sweet garden; but less than at any other time would he listen to whispers of superstition. Vanno pulled the old-fashioned bell of the front door, and heard it ring janglingly with that peculiar plaintiveness which bells have in empty houses. It seemed to complain of being roused from sleep, when waking could give no promise of ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... through us, but through Himself, from all time and through all eternity. To feel is better than to observe, to pray is better than to inquire, but indiscriminate abandonment to our feelings would lead us to give credence to every superstition. You have, I perceive, escaped from the rank materialism of Sir Owen's teaching, but whither are you drifting, my dear child? You must return to the Church; without the Church, we are as vessels ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... experiment they proposed was so grotesque that its acceptance by Gilles proves that he was either insane or a victim of the superstition of his time. His wretched accomplices told him that the Evil One alone was capable of revealing the secret of the transmutation of the baser metals into gold, and they offered to summon him to their master's aid. They assured Gilles that Satan would require a recompense for his ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Popery, Superstition, Ignorance and Knavery very unjustly by a letter in the general pretended; but as far as was charg'd very fully proved upon the Dissenters that were concerned in the Surey Imposture. 1698. ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... leading problem appears to me, in spite of all this, not completely exhausted. It might not thus be absolutely ruled out that more than a mere superstition lurks behind the folk belief which conceives of a "magnetic" influence by which the moon attracts the sleeper. Such a relationship is indeed conceivable when we consider the motor overexcitability of all sleep walkers and the effecting of ebb ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... their structures in hollow trees or holes in the rocks, or any similar cavity that chance offered. Thus occasionally the carcass of a dead animal would be occupied by the bees for that purpose. It was no doubt from some such incident that the superstition arose that the bees were engendered by the decaying flesh of the animal; and Virgil, in the following story (From the Georgies, Book IV.1.317), shows how this supposed fact may be turned to account for renewing the swarm when it has been ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... she, returning once more within the tent, "I fear they will be too late. The red post is only just now erected; and the war-dance may last for an hour. It is a useless ceremony—only a superstition. The chief himself does not believe in it; but his braves will not go to battle without performing it. Hark! they ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... have than that of compelling men to believe that there is nothing between infidelity and popery, and of urging them to make a selection between the two, we know not .... Indeed, we fully expect that, as a reaction of the present extravagancies, of the revival of obsolete superstition, we shall have ere long to fight over again the battle with a modified form of infidelity, as now with a modified form of popery. Thus, probably, for some time to come, will the human mind continue to oscillate between the extremes ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... animals forbidden. This singular personage, runs the fable, disappeared after twenty years' sojourn among them, in the direction of the rising sun, having promised to return. When the Spaniards came out of the East their coming was hailed as the return of Quetzalcoatl, and the reverence and superstition surrounding these supposed "children of the sun" protected the Spaniards and permitted their advance into the country, and indeed, was at length conducive to the downfall of Montezuma ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... in February, 1556, and died there on the 21st of September, 1558, in the fifty-ninth year of his age. The last six months of his existence, contrasted with the daring vigor of his former life, formed a melancholy picture of timidity and superstition. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... it will be the Prince of Orange—which comes to quite the same thing." At the same time, however, it was hoped that something might be made of this liberty of conscience. All were not equally sunk in the horrible superstition, and those who were yet faithful to Church and King might be set against their besotted brethren. Liberty of conscience might thus be turned to account. While two great parties were "by the ears, and pulling out each other's hair, all might perhaps be reduced together." ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... evinced, and the personal sacrifices which he made, in his struggle for truth, we must yet lament the hotness of his zeal and the temerity of his onset. In his contest with the Church of Rome, he fell under her victorious banner; and though his cause was that of truth, and hers that of superstition, yet the sympathy of Europe was not roused by his misfortunes. Under the sagacious and peaceful sway of Copernicus, astronomy had effected a glorious triumph over the dogmas of the Church; but under the bold and ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... scholarships for men. And in all the advanced parties' talk—God forgive them—and in all their programmes, they carefully avoid all such subjects. They will talk about the protection of the cow, for that's an ancient superstition—they can all understand that; but the protection of the women is a new and dangerous idea." She turned ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... "And then the superstition about it. It's rather a pretty tale," said Kerr, looking at Flora. "You've seen the ring—a figure of Vishnu bent backward into a circle, with a head of sapphire; two yellow stones for the cheeks and the brain of him of the one blue. Just as a piece of carving it is so fine that ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... all this nonsense about the land question—about the impossibility of settling it in England so long as the superstitious regard for land existed in the English mind? They were quite ready to believe him. They deprecated that superstition most sincerely. They could not understand why a moneyed Englishman's first impulse was to go and buy land; they could give no reason for the delusion existing in the bosom of every Englishman that he, if no ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... the superstition that a tree which had been blown down by the wind gave signs of restlessness and anger before the coming of a storm from the quarter whence came its own fall. It seems to us full of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... frustrated all our efforts to save him, and the poor fellow met his death in the waves. Our cheerfulness was now perfectly destroyed; and my regret for the accident was increased by the fear of the evil impression it might make on the minds of the other men.—Sailors are seldom free from superstition, and if mine should consider this misfortune as a bad omen, it might become such in reality by casting down the spirits so essential in a long and perhaps dangerous voyage. A crew tormenting itself with idle fears will never lend that ready obedience to a commander which is ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... excite her husband to the policy which secured a crown. But to believe that a prediction, giving all the leading events of the lives of several different persons, and those persons actors in scenes so wonderful, would be a folly equally weak and blasphemous. The same superstition is frequently betrayed in these volumes; and we have as many dreams and portents as ever disturbed the sleeping and waking hours of the wife of the first ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... assured was not worth exploring. Blair was just using, or about to use, "any romance of chivalry" as a hyperbolical exemplification of the contemptible in literature. Hume had been arguing against, and Voltaire was still sneering at, all sorts of superstition and supernaturalism. The common cant of criticism for generations had been that "sense" and "reason" were to be the only criteria. Walpole's egregious helmet dropped from no one knew (or knows) where on all these Philistinisms: and squelched them. How it did this, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... that AEschylus felt a gratification in putting down the monstrous rhapsodies to Bacchus and the other deities, with which the idolatrous priests of that day blindfolded and deceived the people; his plays having frequent cuts upon the gross superstition which then darkened the heathen world. For some expressions which were deemed impious he was condemned to die. Indeed christian scholars particularly mark a passage in one of his tragedies in which he palpably predicts, the downfall of Jupiter's authority, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... Reason," says: "Let us devise means to establish schools of instruction, that we may banish the ignorance that the ancient regime of kings and priests has spread among the people. Let us propagate morality, unfettered by superstition." ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... assault was made on the strongholds of superstition; pilgrimages were suppressed, and many wonder-working images were pulled down and destroyed. The famous Rood of Boxley, a figure whose contortions had once imposed on the people, was taken to the market-place ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... itself, has, at length, grown weary? Can't you see that the Church has passed away, and these good priests have gone the same road as their predecessors. Is any acuteness wanting to show that there is an end of this superstition that has enthralled men's minds for a couple of thousand years? No, no, their game is up, and forever. These pious men, who despised this world, and yet had no other hold upon the minds of others ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... toward that helpless boy, such as we, perhaps, never could have had but for his baptism. Never will a member of that witnessing congregation see him, without a feeling of tenderness and something bordering on respect; he will not be merely "Silly Joe" to them; that element of truth in the heathen superstition, which leads heathens and pagans to regard an idiot as something sacred, will have its verification with regard to him; the children of that assembly will be restrained from rudeness and cruelty, in their sports with him, by that ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... No animal or bird could cry like that. The hedgehog, if shut up in a pit, would sometimes utter a wild strange noise, which, heard in the darkness, was startling as the shriek or hoot of an owl. But it was none of these, and giving way for the moment to ignorant superstition, Fred began to get out of the wilderness as fast as he could, till he stumbled over a briar stretched right across his way, fell heavily, and as he struggled up again, he ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... His aid, on the present occasion, though of some use, was by no means indispensable. I forbore to solicit his concurrence, or even to vanquish the scruples he entertained against directing me to the grave of Hadwin. It was a groundless superstition that made one spot more suitable for this purpose than another. I desired Caleb, in a mild tone, to return to the kitchen, and leave me to act as I thought proper. I then proceeded to ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... views are not pronounced. She attends church pretty regularly, but is entirely free from superstition, though not always from intolerance. Adoration of the priesthood is not at all in her line. For politics she cares nothing, except in Victoria where naturally she espouses her father's side warmly, but in an irrational, almost stupid, way. ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... Nothing can illustrate these observations more forcibly than a recollection of the happy conjuncture of times and circumstances under which our republic assumed its rank among the nations. The foundation of our empire was not laid in a gloomy age of ignorance and superstition, but at an epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period. Researches of the human mind after social happiness have been carried to a great extent; the treasures of knowledge ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... denied. Not even the Pope, it was said, had claimed such rights over the conduct and jurisdiction of English bishops as were claimed by the king. The prohibition of attacks on the "king's religion" was set at nought. Sermons against superstition were preached from every pulpit; and the two most famous divines of the day, Tillotson and Stillingfleet, put themselves at the head of a host of controversialists who scattered pamphlets and tracts ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... late spirit of enthusiasm. The writer had by long experience observed, that in company, very grave discourses have been followed by bawdry; and therefore has turned the humour that way with great success, and taken from his audience all manner of superstition, by the agitations of pretty Mrs. Bignell,[175] whom he has, with great subtlety, made a lay-sister, as well as a prophetess; by which means, she carries on the affairs of both worlds with great success. My friend designs to go on with another work against ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... more His pitying love, having any part in it. She thinks that she may win her desire furtively, and may carry it away, and He be none the wiser nor the poorer for the stolen blessing. What utter, blank ignorance of His character and way of working! What gross superstition! Yes, and withal what a hunger of desire, what absolute assurance of confidence that one finger-tip on His robe was enough! Therefore she had her desire, and her Healer recognised her faith as true, though blended with much ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... be remarked, are influenced in the most important and momentous actions of their life, by superstition; this fact is readily explained, when we reflect that the vast majority of them are utterly devoid of the very first rudiments of education, and owe the position they occupy to the fortune of civil war or of the gambling-table. Except in the mere texture and richness ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a time before this curious superstition had attained its present jocular popularity among white people, and while I had heard of it before, it had not yet outgrown the charm ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... gloomily. "I suppose it is superstition, or you may have it in your blood; but the horror I have of the eyes of a snake—I cannot tell you of it. Perhaps I was frightened when I was a child—I cannot remember; or perhaps it was the stories of the old women. The serpent is very ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... the ship bounded to his feet. They had not heard the first sounds, but these they heard, and in that superstition which is natural to the sailor, each man's first thought was that the noises came from the sky, and so each looked with a stupefied ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... is found in Arndt's Murchen, Berlin, 1816. The ballad appeared first in St. Nicholas, whose young readers were advised, while smiling at the absurd superstition, to remember that bad companionship and evil habits, desires, and passions are more to be dreaded now than the Elves and Trolls who frightened the children ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the rosary, opening the Koran and reading the first verse sighted, etc., etc. At Al-Medinah it is called Khirah and I have suggested (Pilgrimage, ii. 287) that it is a relic of the Azlam or Kidah (divining arrows) of paganism. But the superstition is not local: we have the Sortes Virgilianae (Virgil being a magician) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... The hands of superstition were also weakened, for the important sciences of astrology, miracle, and divination, supported by the cell, have been losing ground ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... Chief on the cottonfield fiddle. Nigger Jim, though it was two generations gone which linked him with the wilds of the Gold Coast, was the slave of fanatical imagination, and in Ingolby's own mind there was the persistent superstition that all would be well, because of a dream he had had. He dreamed he heard his dead mother's voice in the room, where he lay. She had called him by name, and had said: "Look at me, Max," and he had replied, "I cannot see," and she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Maitland provoked by the rival whom she knew to be as adroit with the sword as with the pistol. She would not have been the great-grandchild of a slave of Louisiana, if she had not combined with the natural energy of her hatreds a considerable amount of superstition. A fortune-teller had once foretold, from the lines in her palm, that she would cause the violent death of some person. "It will be he," she had thought, glancing at her husband with a horrible tremor of hope.... And now she had the proof, the indisputable proof, that her plot for vengeance was ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... monstrosities of Brahminism, it extends in one direction from the Persian Gulf to Formosa and Japan, and in the other from the wastes of Siberia to the Gulf of Siam. Scarce any of the other forms of heathenism darken so large a portion of the map as Buddhism,—a superstition which is estimated to include within its pale nearly one third of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... shuffle that eats up its forty miles a day—and rode on together like brothers, heading for a distant pass in the mountains where the painted cliffs of the Bulldog break away and leave a gap down to the river. To the east rose Superstition Mountain, that huge buttress upon which, since the day that a war party of Pimas disappeared within the shadow of its pinnacles, hot upon the trail of the Apaches, and never returned again, the Indians of the valley have ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... possessors of it, and it was not until the introduction of Nelson's Gelatine that people were brought to believe that jelly could be made other than in the old-fashioned way. Even now there is a lingering superstition that there is more nourishment in jelly made of calves' feet than that made from Gelatine. The fact is, however, that Gelatine is equally nutritious from whatever source it is procured. Foreign Gelatine, as is well known, does sometimes contain substances ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... reading or culture—it comes of itself by nature, or not at all; nor has it over-much to do with thought. Only in something like superstition can it find expression, but that must be childlike and sweet and sincere, and without the giggling with which such subjects are invariably received by ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of Lincoln," says of this time, when General Lee was marching Northward toward Pennsylvania, that "now, the President, with that tinge of superstition which ran through his character, 'made,' as he said, 'a solemn vow to God, that, if Lee was driven back, he would issue the Proclamation;'" and, in the light of that statement, the concluding words of Mr. Lincoln's reply to the deputation aforesaid:—"I can assure you that the ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... utility, did he have much to endure and much from which to gather merit. With the zeal of Elias did he relentlessly persecute divine offenses, while he at the same time loved the persons most especially. It was the same for him to discover any trace of superstition or the slightest vestige of the badly extinguished infidelity, and to fly to its destruction with all his power. Amid continual risks of losing his life, he exercised his gigantic charity for many years in directing the souls of those islands to God, without any fear of death ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... it was, with curtains awry, and it must have been of use to all the branches of the Pemberton family in cleaning out their attics. Here was the old stuffed chair in which Pemberton I. had died, and the cot which had been in the cook's room till she had protested. The superstition among the chiefs was that all the women employees were very grateful for this charity. The room was always shown to exclamatory visitors, who told Mr. Pemberton that he was almost too good. But in secret conclaves at lunch the girls called the room "the junk-shop," and said that they would rather ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... hour before dawn, traditionally the worst for man. The hour superstition sets apart for its own, when the life flame burns lowest. At a distance a dog had treed some little wood creature, and ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... pinkish brownstone, with a long flight of ugly stairs from the street to the first floor. The common belief that all city houses of this type must be dark and dreary just because they always have been dark and dreary is an unnecessary superstition. ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... of witchcraft, but they made such narrations the subjects of preaching and prayer; and as cowardice makes us all cruel, men who were blameless in many of the relations of life, and even praiseworthy in some, became, from superstition, cruel persecutors about this time, showing no mercy towards any one whom they believed to be in ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... "My superstition must look out for itself," said Darrell, with a shrug; and, seeing that I was puzzled, he added, "Mr Tate is not pleased with me because I am of the ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... difficult to catch every word. He mentioned my 'Fairy Legends,' and hoped he should soon have the very great enjoyment of reading the second volume. 'You are our—I speak of the Celtic nations' (said Sir Walter)—'great authority now on fairy superstition, and have made Fairy Land your kingdom; most sincerely do I hope it may prove a golden inheritance to you. To me,' (continued Sir Walter) 'it is the land of promise of much future entertainment. I have been reading the German translation of your tales and the Grimms' very elaborate ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... you in the words of a favorite author of the day. He says, 'It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old, even in youth, among—old things. In Thebes, ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... celebrated work upon predestination, he maintained that "material fire is no part of the torments of the damned;"[239] a very singular notion in those times of frightful superstition, when the minds of men were harrowed into despair by descriptions of hell's torments—and I notice it here merely because I should like to be informed in what curious book the said John Scotus Erigena acquired the said notion? Let us now ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... widely known, he was the compiler. "The Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies" is a miscellany of extracts from many sources, and of short essays by Raynal's brilliant acquaintances, on superstition, tyranny, and similar themes. The reputed author had written for the public prints, and had published several works, none of which attracted attention. The amazing success of this one was not remarkable ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... their noonday meal; and, grown sociable by travel, and bold by safety, they joined and partook of the rude fare with the zest of fatigue and youth. Sometimes, too, at night, they saw, gleam afar and red by the woodside, the fires of gipsy tents. But these, with the superstition derived from old nursery-tales, they scrupulously shunned, eying them with a mysterious awe! What heavenly twilights belong to that golden month!—the air so lucidly serene, as the purple of the clouds fades gradually away, and up soars, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 2 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Variety of Superstition—The Belief in Witchcraft the most horrid Form of Superstition—Most flourishing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries—The Sentiments of Addison, Blackstone, and the Lawyers of the Eighteenth Century upon the Subject—Chaldean and Persian ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... invulnerable amidst all the fierce conflicts his gentle words excited. His white shield was so spotless that the least scrupulous combatants did not like to leave their defacing marks upon it. One would think he was protected by some superstition like that which Voltaire refers to as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... could not be drawn out. She professed herself so disgusted at Elsie's "superstition" that I could get no coherent account of what Aleck was supposed to have seen. So I left her to vent her wrath on the defenceless vegetables, and determined to seek a more ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... 'Pilate's Staircase.' While he, with others, desirous of obtaining the promised indulgence, was laboriously climbing up the stair on his knees, he thought that he heard a voice of thunder crying out, 'The just shall live by faith.' He rose at once, shuddering at the depth to which superstition had plunged him, and fled from the scene of his folly. Yes, those words are the key-note of all the arguments by which our glorious work must be supported," exclaimed Albert. "Yes, faith without works justifies us before God; that is ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... to me examples of feminine incomprehensibleness as typified in their wives; mention frequently the fair applause which their merits have wrung from some persons, and the attacks to which certain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I was less free from superstition about my own power of charming, I occasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my confiding friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged to hint at a corresponding experience ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... shall have penetrated to every part of the vast Australian continent, these sacred names, bestowed by us upon some of its outworks, may be pronounced with pleasure, as commemorative of the time when the darkness of ignorance and superstition was just beginning ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... superstition linked with his curiosity, for nearly all Canucks are superstitious; but at any rate the very next day he set about building the trap that should capture the "deevil bar," and make him ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the moon, the cayman, and other filthy animals. These people regarded certain old men, as corrupt and as deceived as the divinities whom they were serving, as the ministers of those deceitful gods. The customs of those people were very analogous to the doctrines that directed them. Every kind of superstition was practiced; homicide was a praiseworthy and meritorious action; and their sacrifices on some occasions were human lives. In that vineyard so filled with wickedness the above-mentioned fathers announced the triune and one God, the mystery of the incarnation, and the eternal duration ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... teaching with words and writings, there were stout English hearts labouring also on the practical side of the same conflict, instilling the same lessons, and meeting for themselves the same consequences. Speculative superstition was to be met with speculative denial. Practical idolatry required a ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... first sprung into existence, will desolate unhappy Europe. My hopes appear to you too bold,—I read it in your doubting countenances; but listen to me whilst I explain. Religious disagreements will give rise to these frenzies. Then first will Fanaticism, the wild son of Hatred and Superstition, untie all the bonds of nature and humanity. The father will murder the son, and the son the father; kings will joyfully dip their fingers in the blood of their subjects, and place the sword in the hands of bigots, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... it had become a habit and the habit still continues in regard to the community—you are not likely to have upheavals of great magnitude here. Now all other countries are moved by different spirits, some by patriotism and gallantry like the French, some by superstition and ignorance worked on by mystic religion, as in my country—some by ruthless materialism like Germany; but that dull, solid sense of duty is purely English—and it is really ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... lie about the Thundering Legion; is convinced that Tiberius moved the senate to admit Jesus among the gods, and pronounces the letter of Agbarus, King of Edessa, to be a record of great authority. Nor were these errors the effects of superstition, for to superstition Addison was by no means prone. The truth is, that he was writing about what ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... and similar topics, which a peasantry full of ancient tradition and enthusiasm and superstition readily associate with the commonest occurrences of life, the people of Corrievale continued to converse till the fall of evening, when each, seeking their home, renewed again the wondrous subject, and illustrated it with all that popular belief and poetic imagination ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... story of savagery and superstition, of blood and intolerance, of bravery and cowardice, of love and beauty. Yet through it all, even through the redes that described the Conquest, there was a curious remoteness, a lack of emotion that made the verses more terrible as they flowed in ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... largest and strongest of sea-birds, that ranges over the southern seas, often seen far from land; it is a superstition among sailors that it is ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... begins when the savant modestly begs permission to utilize a single life for the advancement of science. He is execrated as a monster, and burned alive in expiation of his crime. Absurd inconsistency, trivial superstition! from which it is time that at least the scientific world were emancipated. Long enough has the ignorant rabble exercised brute tyranny over intellects towering above its comprehension. The time for concession is past, the moment has arrived for the savant to assume ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... and believed everything I heard. Some of their stories bordered upon the supernatural. They believed that their rifles might be spellbound, so as not to be able to kill a buffalo, even at arms-length. This superstition they had derived from the Indians, who often think the white hunters have laid a spell upon their rifles. Miller partook of this superstition, and used to tell of his rifle's having a spell upon it; but it often seemed to me to be a shuffling way of accounting for a bad shot. If a hunter ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... a large number of pious persons, who had deeply regretted the suppression of the forms of devotion in which they had been reared, and who were very happy in returning to the old worship. And, indeed, there was then no manifestation of superstition or of bigotry sufficient to alarm the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... conquer at the last, because Christ is stronger than the devil; good is stronger than evil; light is stronger than darkness; God's Spirit, the giver of life, and health, and order, is stronger than all the evil customs, and ignorance, and carelessness, and cruelty, and superstition, which makes miserable the lives and, as far as we can see, destroys the souls of thousands. Yes, I say, Christ's kingdom is a kingdom of health and deliverance for body and soul; and it will conquer, and it will spread, and it will grow, till the nations of the world have become the ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... child-likeness of the subjects of the kingdom. No doubt there was a dash of superstition in the impulse that moved the parents to bring their children to Jesus, but it was an eminently natural desire to win a good man's blessing, and one to which every parent's heart will respond. It was not the superstition, but ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... over the filed fetters of mankind; and let us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... of the halau, the school for the hula, from our point of view, were a mixture of shrewd common sense and whimsical superstition. Under the head of tabus certain articles of food were denied; for instance, the sugar-cane—ko—was forbidden. The reason assigned was that if one indulged in it his work as a practitioner would amount to nothing; in the language of the kumu, aohe e leo ana kana mau hana, his work ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... cherished, and which was not entirely frustrated till the re-assembly at Trent in the next generation. Justice has never been done to the men who feared to loose their hold on the Church Catholic as the one body to which the promises were made. Their loyalty has been treated as blindness, timidity, or superstition; but that there were many such persons, and those among the very highest minds of their time, no one can have any doubt after reading such lives as those of Friedrich the Wise of Saxony, of Erasmus, of Vittoria ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wrongs of Switzerland. The poem from which we have just quoted, is unquestionably one of his best productions, and contains more of the fire of enthusiasm than all his other works. We feel a reverence almost amounting to superstition, for the poet who deals with nature. And who is more capable of understanding the human heart than the poet? Who has better known the human feelings than Shakspere; better painted than Milton, the grandeur of Virtue; better sighed than Byron over the subtle ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... living wholly barbarous, except in the cities as above, and the villages near them; where they are Christians, as they call themselves, of the Greek church; but even these have their religion mingled with so many relics of superstition, that it is scarce to be known in some places from ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... the company strolled out upon the terraces at a sign from the Lady Beata Bernardini whose loving motherly eyes saw that Caterina needed rest and solitude. "She is strange and pale to-day—like one who hath seen a vision." Lady Ecciva spoke with deep seriousness, for superstition was a vital part of the Cyprian nature, belonging alike ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... "What hath God wrought," I see no essential difference. All three were acts of faith and acknowledgment of a power greater than man. Religion is one, though religions are many. As Principal Fairbairn, my honored predecessor in the Morse lectureship, says: "What we call superstition of the savage is not superstition in him. Superstition is the perpetuation of a low form of belief along with a higher knowledge.... Between fetichism and Christian faith there is a great distance, but a great affinity—the recognition of a ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... but with all my soul I deny the fantastic superstition that our rule can benefit a people like this, a nation of one race, as different from ourselves as dark from light—in colour, religion, every mortal thing. We can only pervert their ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that they could not win the conflict without a great sacrifice of men, they generally abandoned it, and waited for a more favorable opportunity. This was not the result of cowardice, for Harrison says that their bravery and valor were unquestioned. It may have been largely the result of a savage superstition not to force the decrees of Fate. Says Harrison: "It may be fairly considered as having its source in that particular temperament of mind, which they often manifested, of not pressing fortune under any sinister circumstances, but patiently waiting until the chances ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... what few strings there were which kept me in bondage to my sexual nature. I am free." And here the beautiful and intellectually bright girl laughed, and shouted again, "I am free! Free from that awful superstition of sexual bondage. Bless Penloe for helping me to my freedom," ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... as had the habitum et tonsuram clericalem. But in process of time a much wider and more comprehensive criterion was established; every one that could read (a mark of great learning in those days of ignorance and her sister superstition) being accounted a clerk or clericus, and allowed the benefit of clerkship, though neither initiated in holy orders, nor trimmed with the clerical tonsure."—Blackstone's "Com.," iv. b. iv, ch. 28. We have already seen that the king and nobles in this play called ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... revolution that followed the war, the heels were put where the brains ought to have been. An ignorant majority, without competent leaders, could not rule an intelligent Caucasian minority. Ignorance, vice, poverty, and superstition could not rule intelligence, experience, wealth, and organization. It was here that the "one could chase a thousand, and the two could put ten thousand to flight." The Negro governments were built ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... must have been some use and reason for such a well, else the men of long ago would never have toiled to make it. Perhaps the people of Sychar had some superstition about its water which made them prefer it. Or perhaps the stream was owned and used for other purposes, while the water ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Saladin with a sigh, "though indeed it is sad that superstition should thus blind so brave and good a man. Now, Sir Wulf, it is your turn. What say you to my offer? Will you take the princess and her dominions with my love thrown in ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... from Privy Councillor Stengel. This is farther from the truth than the other extreme just discussed. He who will, with an unprejudiced mind, examine cross sections of history at widely separated stages, cannot fail to see that along with the growing tendency of reason to predominate over passion, superstition, and custom there has been a parallel tendency to restrict militarism as a social activity. From a war conceived as religion to war as patriotism, then war as commercialism and the tool of ambition, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... Unconsciously he shared the feeling of boundless pity that these hapless creatures excite among the dwellers in the sunless valleys wherein Nature has placed them. This sentiment has degenerated into a kind of religious superstition in families to which cretins belong; but does it not spring from the most beautiful of Christian virtues—from charity, and from a belief in a reward hereafter, that most effectual support of our social system, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... he must sit on, shivering and smoking, a sack across his shoulders. As the stir of nerve and blood caused by the ferreting subsided, his spirits began to sink. Mists of Celtic melancholy, perhaps of Celtic superstition, gained upon him. He found himself glancing from side to side, troubled by the noises in the wood. A sad light wind crept about the trunks like a whisper; the owls called overhead; sometimes there ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Gray Superstition's whisper dread Debarr'd the spot to vulgar tread; For there, she said, did fays resort, And satyrs hold their sylvan court."— ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an admixture of it in some trifling or enthusiastic shape or other; else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... one which was likely to bring about tragic results. They believed firmly in a class of doctors among their people who professed that they could procure the illness of an individual at will, and that by certain incantations they could kill or cure the sick person. Their faith in this superstition was so steadfast that there was no doubting its sincerity, many indulging at times in the most trying privations, that their relatives might be saved from death at the hands of the doctors. I often talked with them on the subject, and tried to reason them out of the superstitious ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... he fond of looking at a certain open space, near the summit of a high, wooded hill, directly opposite. It was like an oasis among a desert of trees. Had it become overgrown, or had the surrounding timber been cut away, the professor would have taken it much to heart. A voluntary superstition of this kind is not uncommon in elderly gentlemen of more than ordinary intellectual power. It is a sort of half-playful revenge they wreak upon themselves for being so wise. Probably Professor Valeyon would have ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... pounds of the flesh Uncle Donald was in, and the chair in which he deposited it creaked beneath its burden. Once, at Monk's Crofton, Sally had spoiled a whole morning for her brother Fillmore, by indicating Uncle Donald as the exact image of what he would be when he grew up. A superstition, cherished from early schooldays, that he had a weak heart had caused the Family's managing director to abstain from every form of exercise for nearly fifty years; and, as he combined with a distaste for exercise one of the three heartiest appetites in the south-western ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... Sir Brian, "your remarks interest me strangely; for two reasons. First, they confirm your assertion that you are, or were, an habitue of the Rue St. Claude, and secondly, they revive in my mind an old fancy—a superstition." ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... sixteenth century men were far from understanding that respect is due to every religious creed sincerely professed and practised; the innovators, who broke the images of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus, did not consider that by thus brutally attacking that which they regarded as a superstition, they were committing a revolting outrage upon Christian consciences. Such an incident was too favorable for Berquin's enemies not to be eagerly turned to profit by them. Although his prosecution had been resumed, he had hitherto remained at large, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he had not known one moment of calm. When passion was merciful for a time, fear had taken its turn to torment him. It had not availed to demonstrate to himself that fear must be groundless. Love from of old has had a comrade superstition; if he awoke from a wretched dream, he interpreted it as sympathy with Thyrza in some dreadful trial. And behold! he had been right. His flight had profited nothing; woe had come upon her he loved, and upon the man ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... popes stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... be no escape, unless they could shake off the most terrible of all that followed—the dog. And at least one of their number, Silent Tom Ross, was convinced thoroughly that the dog could not be killed, unless they had the unobtainable—a silver bullet. In moments of danger, superstition can take a strong hold, and Paul too, felt a cold chill ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... habitually associated with the Morris, until the Puritans, by their preachings and invective, succeeded in banishing it as an impious and pagan superstition. This accounts for the expression, "The hobby-horse quite forgotten"; and gives a touch of prophecy to Shakespeare's lament: "For, O, for, O, the hobby-horse is forgot." As is well known, however, the hobby-horse ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp
... of it, and it was not until the introduction of Nelson's Gelatine that people were brought to believe that jelly could be made other than in the old-fashioned way. Even now there is a lingering superstition that there is more nourishment in jelly made of calves' feet than that made from Gelatine. The fact is, however, that Gelatine is equally nutritious from whatever source it is procured. Foreign Gelatine, as is well known, does sometimes contain substances which, if not absolutely deleterious, are ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... accepted the apology, and then read a lecture, or rather preached a sermon, that took exactly twenty-five minutes to deliver (he is rather long in the wind), in which he demonstrated the evils of superstition and pointed to a higher and a better path. Bausi replied that he would like to hear more of that path another time which, as he presumed that we were going to spend the rest of our lives in his company, could easily ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... minister, the conductor of souls into the realm of the future, whose dread image, hideous as the imagination could conceive, is constantly introduced in the sepulchral pictures, and who with his attendant demons well illustrates the terrible character of the superstition which first created, then deified, and then trembled before him. Who can become acquainted with such horrors as these without drawing a freer breath, and feeling a deeper gratitude to God, as he remembers how, for many centuries now, the religion of love ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... National decrepitude must be criminal. National death can only be by disease, and yet it is almost impossible, out of the history of the art of nations, to elicit the true conditions relating to its decline in any demonstrable manner. The history of Italian art is that of a struggle between superstition and naturalism on one side, between continence and sensuality on another. So far as naturalism prevailed over superstition, there is always progress; so far as sensuality over chastity, death. And the two contests are simultaneous. ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... there are no words comprising a very fashionable promenade. Public discussions, public debates, public lectures and speeches, are cautiously guarded against; for it is by their means that the people become enlightened enough to deride the last efforts of bigotry and superstition. There is a stringent provision for punishing the poor man who spends an hour in a news- room, but there is nothing to prevent the rich one from lounging away the day in the ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... The same portent has already been mentioned. To this day, modern nations are not wholly free from this superstition. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... timidity and coward tenderness. If the Church is filthy, it must be cleansed; if there be money-changers within its gates, let them be driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe of the cloth, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains of a pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with the manliness and courage of true religion. But prophets have no honour in their own country, rarely in their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it is the Church's martyrs that ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... jealous brides she had read about. She determined to be silent as a self-punishment, and firmly steered the Monarchic into a backwater of her thoughts, while Knight talked of the Valley House party and their credulous superstition. ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... increasing violence. The tzar became suspicious of all strangers of whatever nation, and endeavored to rear a wall of separation around his whole kingdom which should exclude it from all intercourse with other parts of Europe. The German universities were all declared to be tainted with superstition, and all Russians were prohibited, under penalty of the confiscation of their estates, from sending their sons to those institutions. No foreigner, of whatever nation, was allowed to take part in any civil or ecclesiastical ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... senses of the reader is this enchanted domain of wonder-pieces! What an atmosphere of beauty, music, color! What resources of imagination, construction, analysis and absolute art! One might almost sympathize with Sarah Helen Whitman, who, confessing to a half faith in the old superstition of the significance of anagrams, found, in the transposed letters of Edgar Poe's name, the words "a God-peer." His mind, she says, was indeed a "Haunted Palace," echoing to the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... grinding toil, day in and day out, to wrest food from the earth for himself, his womenkind, and children. He understood, too, how noble is the discipline, though pardonable the revolt. He had discovered how little a man truly needs. He had seen in this strange life much cruelty, much crazy superstition, much dirt and senseless discomfort; but he had made acquaintance with love and self-denial. He had learnt, above all, the great lesson—to think twice before judging, and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and then declared that it was not the thing after all. His life was spent in constant excitement; he was ever on the watch, on the point of setting his hand on the realisation of his dream, which always flew away. In reality, beneath his intractable realism lay the superstition of a nervous woman; he believed in occult and complex influences; everything, luck or ill-luck, must depend upon the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... fascinating narrative, or in the more gorgeous and coloured account of Sir James Stephen, in the "Edinburgh Review," forms one of the most impressive displays of human strength and folly, of the greatness of devoted enthusiasm, and of the weakness and credulity of abject superstition. ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... sapphire's "depth of true blue." Pearls are supposed to mean tears; emeralds, jealousy; opals, the essence of bad luck; but the ruby stands for warmth and ardor: all of which it is needless to say is purest unfounded superstition. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... as those now related, are to be traced only to the animal's close observation and watchful jealousy of disposition. Looks, signs, and movements are noticed by him which escape an ordinary observer. The idea that dogs have presentiments of death, and howl on such occasions, is a superstition ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... condition, and of manners, which, in the progress of mankind, raise up to nations a leader and a prince, create, at the same time, a nobility and a variety of ranks, who have, in a subordinate degree, their claim to distinction. Superstition, too, may create an order of men, who, under the title of priesthood, engage in the pursuit of a separate interest; who, by their union and firmness as a body, and by their incessant ambition, deserve to be reckoned in the list of pretenders to power. These different orders ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the antique world grew forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail, illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... a libel, for despite the general superstition of chambers of commerce to the contrary, the estate of cityhood is not necessarily a matter of population nor yet of commerce. That is one of the things which, if we were unaware of it before, we may learn from Charleston. Charleston is not great in ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... From their point of view, the thing seems too absurd to be possible. They are face to face with a class of Irishmen, among whom civilisation seems to have made no perceptible progress for centuries, who scorn every improvement, and are so tied and bound down by aboriginal ignorance and superstition as to be insensible to everything but their ancient prejudices. It cannot be possible, they argue, that Ireland should be given over to the dominion of these people, who, after all, are in the matter of advancement and enlightenment fairly representative of the bulk of the voters for Home ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... of the Septuagint be adopted. The Alexandrian Jews had a superstitious dread of writing the name of God, and put [Greek: Kurhios] not as a translation, but as a mere mark or sign—every one readily understanding for what it really stood. We, who have no such superstition, ought surely to restore the Jehovah, and thereby bring out in the true force the overwhelming testimony of the Psalms to the divinity of Christ, the Jehovah or ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... energies between pointing out the evils of the capitalist system, and the certain bliss of his Socialist republic. The past is nothing but a festering mass of evils; industry is nothing but slavery, religion nothing but superstition, education nothing but dead traditional formalism, social ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... good guess at a woman in the case," he, said. "And you call this a coincidence? She'd say it was a case of intuition. She's very strong on intuition and superstition generally." There was a mixture of tenderness and bitterness in his tone. "Chance brought that advertisement to her eyes. A hat-pin she'd dropped stuck through it, or something of the sort. Enough for her. Nothing would do but that I should ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... full-grown, and exists at all only by condescension and anticipation of the remotest future. We love nothing which is merely good and not fair, if such a thing is possible. Nature puts some kind of blossom before every fruit, not simply a calyx behind it. When the Friend comes out of his heathenism and superstition, and breaks his idols, being converted by the precepts of a newer testament; when he forgets his mythology, and treats his Friend like a Christian, or as he can afford; then Friendship ceases to be Friendship, and becomes charity; that principle which established the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... barbarous, except in the cities as above, and the villages near them; where they are Christians, as they call themselves, of the Greek church; but even these have their religion mingled with so many relics of superstition, that it is scarce to be known in some places from mere sorcery ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... or superstition, that it was an evil journey, did not at all deter him from doing the evil for which the journey was undertaken. With this in view, he dressed himself more carefully than usual to make a favourable impression ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... creative spirit breathed into the social and civic life of Italy by Napoleon's victories and administration; it was at that vivid epoch when the military, political, artistic, and literary talent of the land, so long repressed and thwarted by superstition and despotism, broke forth, that his studies were achieved. We have only to compare what was done, thought, and felt in the Peninsula, during the ten years between the coronation of Bonaparte at Milan ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... cordiality of response on the hearts of his old friends and neighbours. The superstition and prejudice of long years could not be broken down in one moment and by one act of self-sacrifice. They watched Michel as he laid his full creel down from his shoulders, and threw across them the strong square ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... that when the Indians destroyed every other human being in the places they attacked, they in many instances saved the lives of the priests. I suspect, however, that they did so, not so much that they respected their sacred character, but because in their superstition they fancied they were possessed of supernatural powers, which might be exercised for their punishment if they ventured to injure them. There were many enlightened and patriotic men among the Indians; and from ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... frontier, and with it is coupled a whisper of "Castine!" a fort has been surprised, he is there! Some of Church's men have fallen in an ambuscade; the baron has planned it, and furnished the arms and ammunition by which the deed was consummated! Superstition invests him with imaginary powers; fanaticism exclaims, 'tis he who had taught the savages to believe that we are the people ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... magazines for August—I forget which—on the statistics of prayer. Not a nice name (perhaps it's not correct, but nearly so), and not a nice article, it seemed to me—but I only glanced at it; produced, like many other faulty things of the kind, by illogical superstition on the part of Christian clergy, most of whom preach a half-belief, some a whole belief, on the efficacy of prayer for temporal good. Then comes the hard unbeliever, delighted to prove, as any child can ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... surface generated and vitalized the cells, and that all organic life thus originated. There is nothing to save this speculation, when it is undressed, from contempt. "The only patronage it ever received grew out of the fact that there is a species of superstition which causes people to take upon credit whatever assumes the name of science, and is opposed to the old superstition of faith in witches and ghosts." With this speculation before us, seemingly plausible, yet false, being fraught with error, we are reminded of the fact that it has been eagerly ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... the rage of hunger was repress'd, Thus spoke Evander to his royal guest: "These rites, these altars, and this feast, O king, From no vain fears or superstition spring, Or blind devotion, or from blinder chance, Or heady zeal, or brutal ignorance; But, sav'd from danger, with a grateful sense, The labors of a god we recompense. See, from afar, yon rock that mates the sky, About whose feet such ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... part of the story having to do with the strange animals. He thought it was peon superstition. But now he was sure there was a rich mine to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... Episcopal; in 1871 the Presbyterians went, and then the Baptists. It was dark. Mighty night had beclouded the intellect and obscured the spiritual senses; civilized sensuality swayed with unchecked hand the destinies of the masses. The blinded people groped for light in the pitchlike blackness of the new superstition. ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... Reincarnation Education of Children Egotism Responsiveness Hell The Commonplace Petroleum Law Communism Happiness Pain Foes in the Household The Inner Life Root of Evils Rest in Change Miserliness Special Providence Human Destiny Ethical Law Human Life Animal Likeness Natural Superstition Adaptiveness of Man Devil Worship Fanaticism Truth Christs Hero Worship Reason Sympathy New Religions The Growth Processes of the Human Soul Necessity for Phenomena Will Change of Atoms Our Limitations ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... gazing mournfully at the seething mass of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity. Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory VII, could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... it is all superstition and nonsense," she used to say, "but in this country, one can't afford to fly in the face of prejudice. It would seriously ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... civilisation, lifts her head defiantly in the wilderness. She is born of the solitudes, a true daughter of the silent places. Here, where men were few and scattered broadcast by the great hand of adventure across the broken miles of all but impassable mountains, superstition is no longer merely an incident but an essential factor in human life and destiny. And here men long ago had come to frown when their questing eyes found the great, gaunt form of David Drennen in the van of some mad rush to new fields: He was unlucky; men who rubbed shoulders ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... full of local gossip and scandal cleverly concealed. Andrew Hamilton figures in it as "Dapper Dumpling." J. N. Barker, the author of "Superstition," is "Billy Mushroom." Joseph Dennie is nicknamed "Oliver Crank." William Warren is dubbed ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... are creditors Sheridan's self could not bilk; But then, as my boy says, "What right has a fullah To ask for the cream, when himself spilled the milk?" Perhaps when you're older, my lad, you'll discover The secret with which Auld Lang Syne there is gilt,— Superstition of old man, maid, poet, and lover,— That cream rises thickest on milk that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in some instances by persons who had actually mingled in the scenes recorded and gave descriptions of them from different points of view and with different details. These works were often diffuse and tedious, and occasionally discolored by the bigotry, superstition, and fierce intolerance of the age; but their pages were illumined at times with scenes of high emprise, of romantic generosity, and heroic valor, which flashed upon the reader with additional splendor from the surrounding darkness. I collated these various works, some of which have never ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... with eager haste, and sally out to wander through the dark streets, thinking he might be led of Providence to meet her. And once out, nothing but utter exhaustion could drive him back; for, how could he tell but in the moment after he had gone she might pass. He had recourse to every superstition of sortilege, clairvoyance, presentiment, and dreams. And all the time his desperation was singularly akin to hope. He dared revile no seeming failure, not knowing but just that was the necessary link in the chain of accidents destined to bring him face to face with her. The ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... that ever happened to me up there was when Carfax disappeared. You remember Carfax? A tall, bony, powerful chap he was, quiet and dour, and with a strong vein of superstition in him. Anyhow, he was a good prospector and a reliable man, and when the rush for the northern fields took place about two years ago. He was one of a party of four of us who had been landed with a few ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... the second source we might have expected more than we find. Knowing that the new religion was not established without struggles and delays and relapses, we might have expected that the traces of the dying superstition would have been numerous in Anglo-Saxon literature. And if we had the domestic writings that were produced in the first Christian ardour, such an expectation might have been partially fulfilled. But in any case we should ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... You can not, madam, conceive the excessive violence with which Englishmen, of a certain class, detest those whose conduct and opinions are not exactly framed on the model of their own. This system of ideas forms a superstition unceasingly demanding victims, and unceasingly finding them. But, however strong theological hatred may be among them, it yields in intensity to social hatred. This system is quite the order of the day at Geneva; and, having once been brought into play for the disquiet of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... The howling of the dogs she considered as a certain omen of her death, and she gave herself up entirely to this ridiculous notion; nor could any thing short of a most excellent constitution have saved her from falling a prey to her own superstition. However, having been almost forced out of her bed, and persuaded with difficulty to put on her cloaths, she soon found, to her great astonishment, that she was as well as ever she was in her life, with the exception of being a little languid ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... bolder and more beneficent advance, even in those powerful developments of national capabilities. It will, perhaps, be left to other nations. Spain and France have a yoke upon their minds, which will disqualify them both from acting the nobler part of guides to Europe. Superstition contains in itself the canker of slavery; perfect freedom is essential to perfect power; and the nation which, from the cradle, prostrates itself to the priest, must retain the early flexure of its spine. The great ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, in the course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its old burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescent superstition. The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... small owl called Cheepai-Peethees, or the death-bird, which the Indians attach the superstition here alluded to, and believe, if it does not answer to their whistle, ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... and local, and therefore become every day less intelligible and less striking.... Much, therefore, of that humour which transported the century with merriment is lost to us, who do not know the sour solemnity, the sullen superstition, the gloomy moroseness, and the stubborn scruples of the ancient Puritans, ... and cannot, but by recollection and study, understand the lines in which they are satirised. Our grandfathers knew the picture from the life; we judge of the life ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... carried Dinky inside my tunic always and felt safer with him there. He hangs at the head of my bed now and I feel better with him there. I realize perfectly that all this sounds like tommyrot, and that superstition may be a relic of barbarism and ignorance. Never mind! Wellsie sized the situation up one day when we were ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... now; a very desperado in the daylight. I laughed at Falkenberg for his superstition, and told him science had disposed of all such nonsense ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... withal, [Footnote: It was supposed infallibly to predict weather and to regulate sowing-time. Thus if the southern side flowered first drought was to be expected, and vice versa. Now the peasant refers to San Isidro, patron of Orotava: he has only changed the form of his superstition.] when De Lugo and the conquistadores entered the valley in 1493 and said mass in its hollow. But that event was only four centuries ago, and dates are ticklish things when derived from the rings and wrinkles ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the Aberystwith beach when I got there, though it was only half-past six. He hadn't said a word the night before, but he made up his mind then to find some amber—for me. You see, he knew the superstition about luck, and how everybody ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... estates. Father Kampmuller, the bosom friend of the Count Grashalkowitz, was confessor to the court of Vienna, and there was no possible kind of persecution I did not suffer from priestcraft. Far from being useful members of society, they take advantage of the prejudices of superstition, exist for themselves alone, and sacrifice every duty to the support of their own hierarchy, and found a power, on error and ignorance, which is destructive of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... writing a damned play, which I wrote several years ago, called 'The Wife of Bath.' As it is approved or disapproved of by my friends, when I come to town, I shall either have it acted, or let it alone, if weak brethren do not take offence at it. The ridicule turns upon superstition, and I have avoided the very words bribery and corruption. Folly, indeed, is a word that I have ventured to make use of; but that is a term that never gave fools offence. It is a common saying, that he is wise that knows himself. What has ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... to something still worse. Such is the firm belief, not only of Hindus, but of Parsees, even the most enlightened amongst them. The strange behaviour of the Indian crows explains, to a certain extent, this superstition. The vultures are, in a way, the grave-diggers of the Parsees and are under the personal protection of the Farvardania, the angel of death, who soars over the Tower of Silence, watching the occupations of the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... protesters be ever so cogent an argument against the Catholic creed, this does not bring them a whit nearer to the Protestant; though in fact there is nothing to show that their protest was founded on historical grounds, or on any argument deeper than such existing instances of superstition and scandal in detail as are sure to ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... told that the very sons of such Jew jobbers have been made bishops: persons not to be suspected of any sort of Christian superstition, fit colleagues to the holy prelate of Autun, and bred at the feet of that Gamaliel. We know who it was that drove the money-changers out of the temple. We see, too, who it is that brings them in again. We have in London very respectable persons of the Jewish nation, whom we ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... directed to destroying the happiness of God's finest creation—man. Treating the Devil from a Darwinian point of view, we may assert that he developed himself from the protoplasm of ignorance, and in the gloomy fog of fear and superstition grew by degrees into a formidable monster, being changed by the overheated imaginations of dogmatists into a reptile, an owl, a raven, a dog, a wolf, a lion, a centaur, a being half monkey, half man, till, finally, he became a ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the unwilling acquiescence of men who were without courage to refuse. The king was divided against himself. Nine days in ten he was the clear-headed, energetic, powerful statesman; on the tenth he was looking wistfully to the superstition which he had left, and the clear sunshine was darkened with theological clouds, which broke in lightning and persecution. Thus there was danger at any moment of a reaction, unless opportunity was taken at the flood, unless the work was executed too completely ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... atmosphere. Mrs. Lespel gave her orders for the walls to be scraped, and said to Cecilia: 'A strange air to breathe, was it not? The less men and women know of one another, the happier for them. I knew my superstition was correct as a guide to me. I do so much wish to respect men, and all my experience tells me the Turks know best how to preserve it for us. Two men in this house would give their wives for pipes, if it came ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thing is that we get no good of it, none of the TRUE joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other. If we could intermit that vain superstition somehow, for about three minutes, I often think the air might clear (as by the scramble of the game of General Post, or whatever they call it) and we should all get out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from these positions a happy ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... is merely good business practice, and to neglect it simply because one's holdings are small is to postpone forming the habits which mark a responsible person. Because of superstition and a reluctance to think about death, about three out of every four Americans die intestate. That is about as foolish as leading men into battle without designating a second in command. The Armed Services ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... there is a superstition among the Irish, that the curse of an "innocent" is one of the most unlucky ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... seriously how it might be improved. During the Reform enthusiasm which raged for some years after the Crimean War ecclesiastical affairs were entirely overlooked. Many of the reformers of those days were so very "advanced" that religion in all its forms seemed to them an old-world superstition which tended to retard rather than accelerate social progress, and which consequently should be allowed to die as tranquilly as possible; whilst the men of more moderate views found they had enough to do in emancipating the serfs and reforming the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of Romish superstition saved Pitt Crawley in Lady Southdown's opinion, whilst his admiration for Fox and Napoleon raised him immeasurably in Miss Crawley's eyes. Her friendship with that defunct British statesman was mentioned when we first introduced her in this history. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that these various unexplained occurrences never happened in daylight, and thus notwithstanding the strangeness of the thing, when morning came they began to think it must have been the fancy of the night. Not being given to superstition, they clung, throughout several weeks of annoyance, to the idea that some natural explanation of these seemingly mysterious events would at last appear, nor did they abandon this hope ...
— Hydesville - The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism • Thomas Olman Todd
... Another brutal sea-superstition vindicated. From now on and for always these imbeciles of ours will believe that Finns are Jonahs. We are west of the Diego de Ramirez Rocks, and we are running west at a twelve-knot clip with an easterly gale at our backs. And the carpenter is ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... listeners. A private with dice had professed to solve the riddle of the Number Seven, and had even alleged that twelve might be easier to throw if one kept repeating the verse, but this by his fellows was held to be rank superstition. No really acceptable exposition had been offered of the woman clothed with the sun, and under her feet the moon, and upon her head ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... never loved Commissioners revising her statutes and reforming her schools, but the Commissioners of 1550 were worse than prigs, worse even than Erastians: they were barbarians and wreckers. They were deputed by King Edward VI., 'in the spirit of the Reformation,' to make an end of the Popish superstition. Under their hands the library totally disappeared, and for a long while the tailors and shoemakers and bookbinders of Oxford were well supplied with vellum, which they found useful in their respective callings. It was a hard fate for ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... and in Mexico there was a College of Augurs, corresponding in purpose to the auspices of ancient Rome, who practised no other means of divination than watching the course and professing to interpret the songs of fowls. So natural and so general is such a superstition, and so wide-spread is the respect it still obtains in civilized and Christian lands, that it is not worth while to summon witnesses to show that it prevailed universally among the red race also. What imprinted it ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... freckled man with red hair. Contrary to superstition, he didn't have a fiery temper. He was forty and had already built up a seniority of twenty years in deep space. He was captain of his ship and wanted nothing more. Sure, it was only a three-man crew—himself, a flight engineer, an astronavigator. But it was an E ship, which meant ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... commerce will flourish under the guidance of the distinguished men who abound in Spain ... The king, the bishops, all the venerable ecclesiastics will instruct the faithful in the Roman Catholic Apostolic religion without fear of seeing its beauty tarnished by ignorance and superstition, and, who knows, this decree may contribute to the realization, some day, of ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... buried among the clouds," said Godolphin, smiling at that superstition which Lucilla had borrowed ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that the Indians, believing in one great Spirit and Fountain of Life, like the Jews, does not prove their descent from the missing tribes, because in a savage state their very ignorance and superstition lead them to confide in the works of some divine superior being. But savages are apt to be idolaters, and personate the deity by some carved figure or image to whom they pay their adoration, and not, like the Indians, having a clear and definite idea of one great Ruler of the ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Unmov'd reflect that here were sung Carols of joy, by beauty's tongue, Is fit, where'er he deigns to roam, And hardly fit—to stay at home. Spent here in peace one solemn hour, 'Midst legends of the YELLOW TOWER, Truth and tradition's mingled stream, Fear's start, and superstition's dream[1] [Footnote 1: A village woman, who very officiously pointed out all that she knew respecting the former state of the castle, desired us to remark the descent to a vault, apparently of large dimensions, in which she had heard that no candle would continue burning; "and," ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... the olden time, there was a beautiful superstition in Germany, that on Christmas eve our Saviour, just as he was when a little child here below, comes at midnight in at the door, and fills all those children's shoes with gifts, who have followed His example of goodness and obedience. You know that you hang up your ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... attentively the doublings of this fox, and while I yield to no man in solemn fidelity to truth, I want to be sure that what I accept as such, is not merely old error under new garbs, only a change of disguising terms. Science has its fetich, as well has superstition, and abstruse terminology does not always conceal its stolid gross proportions. The complete overthrow and annihilation of the belief in a personal, governing, prayer-answering God, is the end and aim of the gathering cohorts of science, and the sooner masking technicalities ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... parapet and sit there, making her toilet, and then stretch out on the sand-bags for a nap. At this point it was not possible to show a hand or a periscope or any other small object without drawing the fire of some alert boche, but they never shot at the cat I don't know why, superstition, perhaps. ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... have affirmed God even in the act of denying Him. Professor Haeckel declares his belief in God on every page of his "Riddle of the Universe," the famous book in which he says that God, Freedom, and Immortality are the three great buttresses of superstition, which science must make it her business to destroy. So far science has only succeeded in giving us a vaster, grander conception of God by giving us a vaster, grander conception of the universe in which we live. When I say God, I mean the mysterious Power which ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... yet the patriarch of Israel did not stand alone in this respect among the Semites. The old Canaanitish chieftains also of the patriarchal period, Melchizedek and Abimelech, worship the same God as he,[39] while on the other hand in his own family not all traces of polytheistic superstition have disappeared,[40] and these traces are also visible ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... then, to decide whether that freedom, at whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good; the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of eloquence; the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and arts, and embellished life ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus is superstition. ...
— Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus • Ludwig Wittgenstein
... of the kingdom, and often from the continent. All ranks, all orders of society, all religions, leaned upon his power to ameliorate disease, and to prolong existence. The rigid and sternly pious, who had attempted to renounce his aid, from a superstition that no blessing would attend the prescriptions of a sceptic, sacrificed, after a time, their superstitious scruples to their involuntary consciousness of his mighty skill." Mr. Mathias, though he severely ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a man by whom Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no insignificant favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites cunning with devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... it was amusing to see one little fellow of eight years old smoking, with much gravity, his father's cigar. How the worship of the sacred plant of tobacco has spread through all Europe! I am sure that the persons who cry out against the use of it are guilty of superstition and unreason, and that it would be a proper and easy task for scientific persons to write an encomium upon the weed. In solitude it is the pleasantest companion possible, and in company never de trop. To a student it suggests all sorts ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of barbarous ages," said Mr. Stackpole "a piece of superstition handed down from father to son a set of false ideas which men are bred up and almost born with, and that they can ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... like Bacon (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the High Priest of the English Creed, le gros bon sens, with the lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum. He seems to see the injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the a posteriori superstition, the worship of "facts," and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke "freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas." Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... that it is so, when we consider how for long, weary centuries the millions of professed Christendom stooped, awestricken, under the yoke of spiritual and temporal despotism, grinding on from generation to generation in a despair which had passed complaining, because superstition, in alliance with tyranny, had filled their upward pathway to freedom with shapes of terror,—the spectres of God's wrath to the uttermost, the fiend, and that torment the smoke of which rises forever. Through fear of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... causes are assigned for this, such as a ground frost, the carcasses of black-fish kept to rot in the harbor, and the like; but the most common account of the matter is,—and I find that a similar superstition with regard to the disappearance of fishes exists almost everywhere,—that, when Wellfleet began to quarrel with the neighboring towns about the right to gather them, yellow specks appeared in them, and Providence caused them to disappear. A few years ago sixty thousand bushels were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... firmly in a class of doctors among their people who professed that they could procure the illness of an individual at will, and that by certain incantations they could kill or cure the sick person. Their faith in this superstition was so steadfast that there was no doubting its sincerity, many indulging at times in the most trying privations, that their relatives might be saved from death at the hands of the doctors. I often talked with them on the subject, and tried to reason them out of the superstitious belief, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... witch, tears of rapturous admiration? "Ten thousand men," says M. Michelet himself, "ten thousand men wept; and of these ten thousand the majority were political enemies knitted together by cords of superstition." What else was it but her constancy, united with her angelic gentleness, that drove the fanatic English soldier—who had sworn to throw a fagot on her scaffold as his tribute of abhorrence, that did so, that fulfilled his vow—suddenly ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... of danger. He was thus far safe. So frequently and completely had his enemy been baffled in the brief progress of a single night, that he was almost led to believe—for, like most criminals, he was not without his superstition—that his foe was under some special guardianship. With ill-concealed anger, and a ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... capable of evading with skill the performance of troublesome ceremonies, and that he could speak on religion with the popish missionaries without harshness, but with a considerable quickness of repartee. His superstition was probably, therefore, of that nature which is usually assumed by princes ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... religious woman—that is, she had lived among such utterly irreligious people, that whatever she thought or felt upon these subjects had to be kept entirely to herself—but she was of a religious nature. She said her prayers duly, and she had one habit—or superstition, some might sneeringly call it—that the last thing before she went on a journey she always opened her Bible; read a verse or two, and knelt down, if only to say, "God, take care of me, and bring me safe back again;" petitions that in many a wretched compelled wandering ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and my idea was still to exclude brutal solutions. As my confusion cooled I was lost in wonder at the importance I had attached to Miss Bordereau's crumpled scraps; the thought of them became odious to me, and I was as vexed with the old witch for the superstition that had prevented her from destroying them as I was with myself for having already spent more money than I could afford in attempting to control their fate. I forget what I did, where I went after leaving the Lido and at what hour or with what ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... interview with the strangers of the East, and had trembled lest the altar should be kindled upon the ruins of his fame. For Cleonice was wholly, ardently, sublimely Greek, filled in each crevice of her soul with its lovely poetry, its beautiful superstition, its heroic freedom. As Greek, she had loved Pausanias, seeing in him the lofty incarnation of Greece itself. The descendant of the demigod, the champion of Plataea, the saviour of Hellas—theme for song till song should be no more—these attributes were what she beheld and loved; ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... he chose to wear rather than a periwig." St. Evremond was a kind of Epicurean philosopher, and drew his own character in the following terms, in a letter to Count de Grammont. He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination for pleasure: a man who had never felt the pressure of indigence, and who had never been in possession of affluence: he lived in a condition despised by those who have everything, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... shows of gladiators, originated in the barbarous sacrifices of human beings, which prevailed in remote ages. In the gloomy superstition of the Romans, it was believed that the manes, or shades of the dead, derived pleasure from human blood, and they therefore sacrificed, at the tombs of their ancestors, captives taken in war, or wretched slaves. It was ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... defensive works of the district, and protected the Marcher lords in their occupation. The Christmas court was held at Lincoln; but warned perhaps by the recent ill luck of Stephen in defying the local superstition, Henry did not attempt to wear his crown in the city. Crown wearing and ceremony in general were distasteful to him, and at the next Easter festival at Worcester, together with the queen, he ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... nights the domestics watched the southern tower. Although nothing remarkable was seen, a report was soon raised, and believed, that the southern side of the castle was haunted. Madame de Menon, whose mind was superior to the effects of superstition, was yet disturbed and perplexed, and she determined, if the light reappeared, to inform the marquis of the circumstance, and request the ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... and long afterwards, the Licenser regarded it as his chief duty to protect the court against all possibility of attack from the stage. With the morality of plays he did not meddle much; but he still clung to the old superstition that the British drama had only a right to exist as the pastime of royalty; plays and players were still to be subservient to the pleasure of the sovereign. The British public, who, after all, really supported the stage, he declined to consider in the matter; conceding, however, that they were ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... a superstition, a mere myth, perhaps, born of words? I think not. Surely if we could really arrive at knowing such a masterpiece, so as to feel rather than see its most intimate organic principles, and the great main reasons separating it from all inferior works and making it be itself: ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... have been regarded with as much affright as that which drove the throng from Wall Street and Broadway at the approach of a new pestilence. There were autumnal fevers too, and a contagious and destructive throat-distemper,— diseases unwritten in medical hooks. The dark superstition of former days had not yet been so far dispelled as not to heighten the gloom of the present times. There is an advertisement, indeed, by a committee of the Legislature, calling for information as to the circumstances of sufferers in the "late calamity of 1692," with ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... faction—strong enough in every community to control on the slightest division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the cunning and unscrupulous of both parties. Its credulity is imposed upon, its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses misdirected—and even its superstition made to play its part in a campaign in which every interest of society is jeopardized and every approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as this—the folly and the bitterness and the danger of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... pit, would sometimes utter a wild strange noise, which, heard in the darkness, was startling as the shriek or hoot of an owl. But it was none of these, and giving way for the moment to ignorant superstition, Fred began to get out of the wilderness as fast as he could, till he stumbled over a briar stretched right across his way, fell heavily, and as he struggled up again, he ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... of superstition is as follows. They believe the dead walk by night and feed upon guarina, a fruit resembling the quince, but unknown in Europe. These ghosts love to mix with the living and deceive women. They take on the form of a man, and seem to wish to enjoy ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... incredible percentage. So said rumour, at any rate. But what was strangest of all was the peculiar fate of those who received money from him: they all ended their lives in some unhappy way. Whether this was simply the popular superstition, or the result of reports circulated with an object, is not known. But several instances which happened within a brief space of time before the eyes of every one ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... herself than a child in years—she was only sixteen when she bore him. They lived at Lyons then, but three years later moved to Paris. Her temperament was poetic, religious, and her spirit had in it a touch of superstition—which is the case with all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... Malvern, to which he returned the next day; and from the spirited speech in which he gave the health of the chairman at the dinner, I will add a few words for the sake of the truth expressed in them. "There is a popular prejudice, a kind of superstition, that authors are not a particularly united body, and I am afraid that this may contain half a grain or so of the veracious. But of our chairman I have never in my life made public mention without adding what I can ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... gods, he replied, "An old woman placed an offering of flour before them, which immediately set them all by the ears, for every one was hungrier than another, but the biggest god killed all the rest with this staff which thou now seest he still holds in his hands." Superstition, especially when combined with mercenary motives, knows neither reason nor human affection, therefore the father handed over his son Abraham to the inquisition of Nimrod, who threw him into the fiery furnace, as ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... accustomed hours to the necessities of nature: his uniformity and constancy in matter of friendship. How he would bear with them that with all boldness and liberty opposed his opinions; and even rejoice if any man could better advise him: and lastly, how religious he was without superstition. All these things of him remember, that whensoever thy last hour shall come upon thee, it may find thee, as it did him, ready for it in the ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... to find a woman upon whom superstition has so slight a hold as it has upon Gwen Darrow, yet, for all that, it required an effort for her to turn and gaze toward the centre of the room. A dim, ill-defined stain of light fell momentarily upon the chair in which the dead man had ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... come into collision with any fact of science. But unfortunately they were enormously outnumbered by the ignorant and the authority passed wholly into their hands. It was inevitable that misunderstanding should follow. The gross materialization of the early teaching, the superstition, the bigotry and the persecution of the Middle Ages was a perfectly natural result. That perverted, materialistic view has come down to us, and even now gives trend to the religious thought of Western civilization. Of that degradation ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... fright, and more so when I related the story and showed him the window opened. Neither of us slept any more that night, but he entertained me with telling me how much more these apparitions were usual in this country than in England; and we concluded the cause to be the great superstition of the Irish, and the want of that knowing faith, which should defend them from the power of the Devil, which he exercises among them very much. About five o'clock the lady of the house came to see us, saying she had not been in bed all night, because a cousin O'Brien of her's, ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... tree had given up blooming, nor could all the pruning and care given it coax a single blossom from it. Miss Corona, tinctured with the superstition apt to wait on a lonely womanhood, believed in her heart that the rosebush had a secret sympathy with the fortunes of the Gordon women. She, the last of them on the old homestead, would never need the bride roses. Wherefore, then, should the old tree bloom? And ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... had caught the trick of an accent which passed unchallenged on the Boulevardes. He had an alert eye for pretty women, a heart as big as all out-doors, no scruples worth mentioning, a secret sorrow, and a pet superstition. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Both all things vain, and all who in vain things Built thir fond hopes of Glorie or lasting fame, Or happiness in this or th' other life; 450 All who have thir reward on Earth, the fruits Of painful Superstition and blind Zeal, Naught seeking but the praise of men, here find Fit retribution, emptie as thir deeds; All th' unaccomplisht works of Natures hand, Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixt, Dissolvd on earth, fleet hither, and in vain, Till final ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... strongest of sea-birds, that ranges over the southern seas, often seen far from land; it is a superstition among sailors that it is disastrous ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Sometimes she reiterated her denunciations of vengeance, her ejaculations of triumph in her frantic project. At the recapitulation of these the remembrance of Antonina was aroused; and then a bloodthirsty superstition darkened her thoughts, and threw a vague and dreamy character over ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... marriage feast, the bride and the groom each struggle to be first to sit on the robe of the other; the idea is that the winner will thenceforth rule. As the Chinese have been many ages at the business of living, the custom should not be dismissed too summarily as mere vain and heathenish superstition. At any rate, Margaret had reasoned it out that she must get the advantage in the impending initial grapple and tussle of their individualities, or choose between slavery and divorce. With him handicapped by awe of her, by almost groveling respect for her ideas ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... on power of supersensory, or extra-sensory perception that what is known as telepathy and clairvoyance are based. That such things really exist, and are not wholly a matter of superstition has been thoroughly demonstrated in a scientific way by the British Society for Psychical Research, and kindred societies in various parts of the world. Strictly speaking, such phenomena as these are not a part of hypnotism, but our ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... more perpendicular to the ecliptic. He actually gathered the dandelion and took it to bits like a scientific child; he touched nature with his fingers instead of sitting looking out of window—perhaps the first man who had ever done so for seventeen hundred years or so, since superstition blighted the progress of pagan Rome. The work he did! But no one reads Linnaeus now; the folios, indeed, might moulder to dust without loss, because his spirit has got into the minds of men, and the text is of little consequence. The best book he wrote to read now is the delightful 'Tour in Lapland,' ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the poet, struck by superstition, "are not you that terrible and unhappy fantom? How many times this fear has taken possession of my dreams! How many times you have appeared to me as the type of the unspeakable agony to which the spirit of inquiry has driven man! With your beauty and your sadness, your ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... happened that this time, in pointing towards the house, Israel unavoidably pointed towards the advancing man. Hoping that the strangeness of this coincidence might, by operating on the man's superstition, incline him to beat an immediate retreat, Israel kept cool as he might. But the man proved to be of a braver metal than anticipated. In passing the spot where the scarecrow had stood, and perceiving, beyond the possibility ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... appears that the hereditary totem is the earlier, and that the Arunta usage is the result of the special and inseparable superstition about the sacred stones. It may be a relatively recent complication of and addition to the theory of reincarnation. Meanwhile, the belief and usage produce an unique effect. The Arunta and Kaitish, we saw, are so advanced socially that they possess not two, or four, but eight matrimonial ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... was one son, whom the parents watched with an intense eagerness and care; but who, in spite of nurses and physicians, had only a brief existence. His tainted blood did not run very long in his poor feeble little body. Symptoms of evil broke out early on him; and, part from flattery, part superstition, nothing would satisfy my lord and lady, especially the latter, but having the poor little cripple touched by his Majesty at his church. They were ready to cry out miracle at first (the doctors and quack-salvers being constantly in attendance on the child, and experimenting ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... business transactions upon each other's worthless paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition. I have seen a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than pleased ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the seagulls fly inland in search of food, the children, not desiring their appearance—because probably of the old superstition that they are prone to pick out the eyes of people—cry ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... poisoned. Serious riots occurred in many places, and great numbers of people fell victims to the fury of the mob under the suspicion of being connected in some way with the ravages of the pestilence. The Jews, ever the objects of popular hostility, engendered by ignorance and superstition, were among the chief sufferers. Bands of marauders wandered through the country plundering the houses left empty by the death of all their occupants, and from end to end death and ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... stronger and stronger, in order to prevent their own houses from being stripped or unroofed, so that very few remained to witness the rage of the conflagration at its full height. The Irish peasantry entertain a superstition that whenever a strong storm of wind, without rain, arises, it has been occasioned by the necromantic spell of some guilty sorcerer, who, first having sold himself to the devil, afterwards raises him for some wicked purpose; and nothing but the sacrifice of a black dog or a black cock—the ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... giving the details of things that never happened—most biography is usually the lie coming from the mouth of flattery, or the slander coming from the lips of malice, and whoever attacks the religion of a country will, in his turn, be attacked. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that superstition defended by all the meanness of ingenuity. Whoever attacks a superstition will find that there is still one weapon left in ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of dreams, and the sufferer in whose behalf the game was played was borne to the cabin in which it was to take place. Preliminary fasting and continence were observed, and every effort made that superstition could suggest to discover who would be the lucky thrower and who could aid the caster by his presence at the contest. Old men, unable to walk thither, were brought up on the shoulders of the young men that their ...
— Indian Games • Andrew McFarland Davis
... seen my friend Stokeman since we were at college together, and now naturally we fell to talking of old times. I remembered him as a hard-headed man without a particle of superstition, if such a thing be possible in a land where we are brought up on superstition, from the bottle. He was at that time full of life and of enjoyment of whatever it brought. I found now that his wild and almost reckless spirits had been tempered by the years which had passed as I ...
— The Spectre In The Cart - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... planted in his heart by that awful experience in Maganguey? Though he had suffered much, yet much had been done for him. The brusque logic of the explorer had swept his mind clear of its last vestige of theological superstition, and prepared it for the truth which, under the benign stimulus of this clear-minded child, would remake his life, if he could now yield himself utterly to it. He must—he would—ceaselessly strive, even though he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... been roasting a waxen image of me, or stirring an unholy brew to confound me! I don't believe in such power; and yet—what if they should ha' been doing it!" Even he could not admit that the perpetrator, if any, might be Farfrae. These isolated hours of superstition came to Henchard in time of moody depression, when all his practical largeness of view had oozed out ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... a person is bitten by this make, and "gets down," i.e. lays in bed three days, he will recover, yet I am very doubtful of this account, more particularly from the women differing from the men, as well as the whole subject being hidden in superstition. Another ground of doubt rests upon the fact of having lost in Van Diemen's Land, a favourite dog, by the bite of a snake very similar to this; the poor animal expired fourteen minutes after the bite, although the piece ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... with hunger, dainty meats that had been offered to idols were set before him, which he would not touch. It was not in itself unlawful to eat of such meats, as St. Paul teaches, except where it would give scandal to the weak, or when it was exacted as an action of idolatrous superstition, as was the case here. Being brought a second time before the tribunal, he would give no other answer to all the questions put to him, but this: "I am a Christian." He repeated the same while on the rack, and he finished his glorious course in prison, either ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... efforts to save him, and the poor fellow met his death in the waves. Our cheerfulness was now perfectly destroyed; and my regret for the accident was increased by the fear of the evil impression it might make on the minds of the other men.—Sailors are seldom free from superstition, and if mine should consider this misfortune as a bad omen, it might become such in reality by casting down the spirits so essential in a long and perhaps dangerous voyage. A crew tormenting itself with idle fears will never lend that ready obedience to a commander which is necessary ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... the despair and confusion of the last ten years of the monarchy. In 1727 we stand on the threshold of that far-resounding fiery workshop, where a hundred hands wrought the cunning implements and Cyclopean engines that were to serve in storming the hated citadels of superstition and injustice. In 1781 we emerge from these subterranean realms into the open air, to find ourselves surrounded by all the sounds and portents of imminent ruin. This, then, is the significance of the date ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... The superstition that maladies can be cured by royal taction is dead, but like many a departed conviction it has left a monument of custom to keep its memory green. The practice of forming a line and shaking the President's hand had no other origin, and when that great dignitary ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... contortionist. When I am unfortunate enough to hook one, I generally make a clean cut of two yards of silk line, hook and all, and tie him up to the fence, or bow stay of my canoe. I would willingly let all of them go again only from a lingering remnant of a boyish superstition that they would go and tell all the bass how horribly indigestible ...
— Black Bass - Where to catch them in quantity within an hour's ride from New York • Charles Barker Bradford
... past, they had outdated views and opinions, and their ideologies were vulgar and unsophisticated. At present we are more knowledgeable, more refined than what has gone before. The people of the past waged unjust wars. They had superstition and prejudices that clouded their visions of morality, and the product of that is a large amount of taboos and precedents and traditions that are immoral or meaningless. Now is the age of enlightenment, ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... tunnels. And at the end of the trail one stumbles upon the tiny, hidden village where the last handful of a once powerful nation has sought refuge. Half-clad, half-fed, half-wild, one might say, they hide away there in their poverty, ignorance, and superstition. But oh, the road one must travel to reach them! I hadn't anticipated Arizona trails when I so blithely announced to White Mountain, "Whither thou goest, I will go." Neither had I slept in an Indian village when I added, "And where ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... perplexity, she could neither repent of, or approve, her late conduct; she could only remember, that she was in the power of a man, who had no principle of action—but his will; and the astonishment and terrors of superstition, which had, for a moment, so strongly assailed her, now yielded ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and almost universally willing, subjection to theological influence. The state of war, or of readiness for war, which was the inevitable accompaniment of feudal tenure, did much to sustain the state of profound ignorance and consequent superstition in which the people of mediaeval times were plunged, both by preventing the pursuit of peaceful occupations and the growth of knowledge, and by increasing the element of danger in life, which always inclines the human mind to a belief in the supernatural. The same results were brought ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Shortly before the time when the hero of the book is launched into the world, the Popish agitation in England had commenced. The Popish propaganda had determined to make a grand attempt on England; Popish priests were scattered over the land, doing the best they could to make converts to the old superstition. With the plans of Rome, and her hopes, and the reasons on which those hopes are grounded, the hero of the book becomes acquainted, during an expedition which he makes into the country, from certain conversations which he holds with ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... no note in the Kaempe Viser, says Mr. Jamieson, on this subject; nor does he attempt to explain it himself. It has, however, a clear reference to a very curious Northern superstition. ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
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